AS EVERY teenager knows, things can get pretty uncomfortable when your text messages are read by people other than the intended recipient.
Blood must have rushed to the cheeks of Mike Aynsley when his chummy texts to Paddy McKillen surfaced in the High Court in London last week.
There is a danger of making a lot out of a little, but the two text messages and the context given to them in court paint a rather different picture of Aynsley and Anglo Irish Bank – now known as Irish Bank Resolution Corporation – from the one so assiduously crafted over the last two or three years.
The Government claims that Anglo – to paraphrase John Cleese – is no more. It has ceased to be. It is an ex-bank. Its new name supposedly says it all. IBRC – we are told – is a vehicle to collect the debts and meet the obligations of Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide. It may possibly play a part in the further restructuring of the banking sector, perhaps as a home for other banks’ loss-making tracker mortgages.
Its purpose is to serve the taxpayers who now own it and nothing epitomises its new mission better than its resolute pursuit of Seán Quinn, which some would argue has gone beyond what makes commercial sense.
IBRC’s attitude towards Quinn makes perfect sense for what is, in effect, a State agency with a clear mandate to get every penny it can back for the taxpayer and to ensure that those responsible for the taxpayers’ losses are held to account as fully as possible.
But this notion of IBRC does not sit well with the rather more “business as usual” tone struck in Aynsley’s text message of last January 27th to McKillen, in which he is sharing a confidential board decision.
“BB have now been told that the bank has chosen a path to work consensually with you rather than to deal with them, I understand they are not happy.”
It was followed a few minutes later with another text: “Please keep that confidential I cant have board positions like this leaking out.”
The texts chime with McKillen’s assertion in court that Alan Dukes, IBRC’s chairman, had told him it would stand by him as a “customer of 25 years” who had “the best performing loans in the bank”.
It does not look great for Aynsley and Dukes. The communications depict them as actively supporting McKillen in a course of action that is counter to the interests of the National Asset Management Agency and, by extension, the taxpayer.
If McKillen succeeds in his action against the Barclay brothers, their decision to buy €800 million of debt off Nama will probably collapse. It’s possible that McKillen’s alternative deal, backed by the Quataris, would produce the same outcome for Nama, but a bird in the hand is the more valuable. There must have been a few heads scratched in Nama over that particular turn of events.
But what really sticks out from the evidence given last week is the alleged reference by Dukes to the 25-year relationship. If he said it, we can only hope he was not thinking about what he was saying. Otherwise, are we to assume he has stepped seamlessly into Seán Fitzpatrick’s shoes as banker to Ireland’s elite?
The simple sentence cuts to the very sensitive issue of IBRC’s relationship with its legacy Anglo clients and what the rules of engagement should be.
One view – and that apparently enunciated by Dukes to McKillen – is that the relationship is ongoing, evolving and also supportive. This is in keeping with the notion that while the State may own Anglo, it is independent of the Government and operates on a commercial basis.
Indeed, this would seem to offer an explanation for why IBRC facilitated the €45.42 million takeover of Siteserve by one of its biggest Anglo legacy clients, Denis O’Brien. The deal saw IBRC write off debts of more than €100 million while the Siteserve management got a €5 million payoff and kept their jobs.
No explanation has been proffered by IBRC.
The justification is presumably commercial expediency, and you might be of a mind to accept it, but for the fact that we are really talking about Anglo Irish Bank here, which just in case you didn’t know was so deeply rotten and morally vacuous an institution it wrecked the country and continues to blight it.
The governor of the Central Bank spent a good portion of last week in Frankfurt trying desperately to find a way not to pour another €3.1 billion of taxpayers’ money down the black hole this bank created.
The notion that IBRC is still chummying up to big Anglo clients and doing deals is very hard for most people to understand. And it’s one the Minister for Finance might find hard to explain.
